I work for a small industrial machinery manufacturer ($10M) Currently use a financial software package and various spreadsheets to run business relying heavily on individuals knowing what has to be done when etc. Looking to formalize and automate as much of the business as makes sense. Primarily looking for inventory control, purchasing, sales order (complete machines and spare parts) processing, invoicing-dispatching and anything else we can do. Generally each project is a base standard machine model + required standard option modules. Some projects can be 80% standard items with 20% customization and some can be 100% engineered from scratch. We manufacture some higher volume standard parts for stock. We normally assemble/ manufacture to order.

What ERP packages should we look at that are suitable in cost and complexity to a company this size?

1st Post

Hello Craig, I'm sure the task is daunting as there are so many companies coming and going offering ERP these days! If I can caution you on anything, it would be to double check, actually triple check that the ERP product you are looking at will handle indented BOMs and allow for changes to be made easily on multiple levels of the BOM (Parent, child and many levels deeper). Based on how you described your product, you manufacture machinery, you must use quite a bit of purchased components and manufactured components in each machine build. That is why this functionality is crucial. Also, you have described your business as Make to stock and make to order, we refer to this as “mixed mode”, (just in case you hear that terminology). An ERP product should be able to handle this as well. Lastly, I would strongly recommend that you take a close look at the scheduling functionality. Because of your product mix, you will need to do forward, backward, finite and infinite as well as possibly a combination of these methods. I hope this helps! Best of luck to you.

1st Post

I faced the same challenge 10 years ago and just wrote my own system using ms access and VB. Company was @ 200 people with 50-60 office and the rest were production (welders, machinists, etc).
Not saying that route is for everyone but ms office is probably enough for many small mfg companies that can't afford to roll the dice on a bad erp system.